As a boy in Rakvere, Estonia, Arvo Pärt practiced on a family piano whose middle section was broken, forcing him to find harmony at the extreme edges of the keyboard. This episode traces how that image foreshadowed a career that made him, at his 90th birthday in 2025, the most performed living composer on earth. It follows his studies with Heino Eller at the Tallinn Conservatory, his prolific work in Soviet film scores and state radio, and his 1960 piece that introduced 12-tone serialism to Estonia.

The episode explains the political whiplash of being condemned by a Soviet official and then winning a national composition prize months later, the 1968 ban on a work containing an explicit declaration of Christian faith, and his decision to stop composing for eight years to study Gregorian chant and early polyphony. It then describes the tintin ...